User Contributed Notes 10 notes

Sometimes you might not want to include a php-file under the specifications defined in the functions include() or require(), but you might want to have in return the string that the script in the file "echoes".

This ends up printing "b" rather than nothing as ob_end_flush() is called instead of ob_end_clean(). That is, die() flushes the buffer rather than cleans it. This took me a while to determine what was causing the flush, so I thought I'd share.

Take care to take exceptions in the code in mind when using ob_start and ob_get_contents. If you do not do this, the number of calls to ob_start will not match those to ob_end and you're not gonna have a good time.

I ran out of memory, while output buffering and drawing text on imported images. Only the top portion of the 5MP image was displayed by the browser. Try increasing the memory limit in either the php.ini file( memory_limit = 16M; ) or in the .htaccess file( php_value memory_limit "16M" ). Also see function memory_get_usage() .

You can now use the $imageData variable to either create another GD image, save it, put it in a database, make modifications to the binary, or output it to the user. You can easily check the size of it as well without having to access the disk...just use strlen();

Now this just blew my mind. I had a problem with MySQL being incredibly slow on Windows 2003 running IIS... on ASP/VBScript pages. PHP is also installed on the server and so is Microsoft SQL 2005 Express. (Yes, we're running ASP, PHP, MySQL and MS SQL on the same Windows 2003 Server using IIS.)

I was browsing the internet for a solution and saw a suggestion that I change output_buffering to on if MySQL was slow for PHP pages. Since we also served PHP pages with MySQL from the same server, it caught my eye. For the hell of it, I went into php.ini and changed output_buffering to on and suddenly MySQL and ASP was faster... MySQL and PHP was faster... Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express and ASP was faster.... everything was faster... even stuff that had no PHP!

And I didn't even have to restart IIS. As soon as I saved the php.ini file with the change, everything got faster.

Apparently PHP and MySQL and IIS are so intertwined somehow that changing the buffering setting really effects the performance of the entire server.

So, if you are having performance problems on Windows 2003 & IIS, you might try setting output_buffering = On in php.ini if you happen to have PHP installed. Having it set to off apparently effects the performance of Windows 2003 and IIS severely... even for webpages that do not use PHP or MySQL.